Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:

It almost seems like they could have tried making a PDP-11 based PC.

I dimly remember that there were efforts in that direction.  But the
PDP-11 does not even have the cumbersome support for more than 64KB
that the 8086 has (there were PDP-11s with more, but that was even
more cumbersome to use).

DEC also tried their hand in the PC-like business (DEC Rainbow 100).
They did not succeed.  Maybe that's the decisive difference from HP:
They did succeed in the PC market.

DEC could have maybe had a marketing advantage in, say, "Hey, our crap
can run UNIX" and "UNIX is better than DOS".

That was not what customers were interested in.  There were various
Unix variants available for the PC, but the customers preferred using
DOS, which was preinstalled and did not cost extra.  And even when you
could install Unix for free in the form of Linux, most customers just
used Windows which was preinstalled, and (probably decisively) for the
network effects).

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>